The present invention relates to an application design support system and a method for the system for use in a system development, and in particular, to an application requirement design support system and a method for the system in which to construct a new system, design information based on system construction examples or cases in the past is combined with design information of existing application products to be reused to design application requirements.
Heretofore, methods of customizing and/or reusing design information prepared by assuming reuse thereof in advance have been provided. For example, JP-A-2002-358200 describes a technique in which by creating flexible software which has high reusability and which can be easily customized, a device for constructing a work system and a work system are implemented while reducing work system developing costs. For this purpose, there are prepared middleware which is basic software shared among various works, frameworks which are categorized by works and which are basic constituent components software, and components which are standardized modules or customized variation modules prepared according to requests from a user and which are attached to and detached from the frameworks according to necessity. The work system constructing device constructs software of a work system by combining the middleware, the frameworks categorized by works, and the components with each other.
There has also been provided a method of efficiently extracting reusable design information from existing design information which has not been prepared assuming reuse of the information. For example, JP-A-09-212353 describes an information processor which appropriately obtains design information for reuse from past design information according to a system development request specification. For this purpose, past design information (diversion source information) reused for design, diversion destination information obtained by diverting or modifying the design source information, identifying information of the diversion source and destination information, and relational information including know-how regarding the reuse such as an object of and a reason for the reuse and a modifying method are stored in a database. In new design of system software, the information processor accesses the database to retrieve therefrom relational information having the specific information items of reuse matching a system development request specification to thereby extract reusable design information.